Indonesia’s palm oil developers threaten the Congo Basin – ‘The Indonesians came here for the first time in September 2010 and started to destroy properties, farmlands, crops, livestock, and houses’

By Hayat Indriyatno 23 February 2013 (Jakarta Globe) – Major palm oil producers accused of destroying Indonesia’s forests and driving its iconic wildlife to the verge of extinction are now taking their practices to the relatively pristine forests of the Congo Basin, an environmental group has warned. In its report, Seeds of Destruction released this […]

NASA data registers strong deforestation signals in Sumatra, Borneo, Brazil, Gabon

29 January 2013 (mongabay.com) – NASA satellites picked up signals of extensive potential deforestation in Sumatra, Borneo, Central Africa, the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon, the Chocó in Colombia and Ecuador, and the Chaco region of Paraguay between October 1 and December 31, 2012, according to the latest update on Mongabay.com’s Global Forest Disturbance Alert System […]

Floods paralyze Jakarta, heavy rains continue – ‘In 30 years of my life here it has never flooded, ever. This is the very first time.’

By Fergus Jensen and Rieka Rahadiana, with additional reporting by Michael Taylor and Janeman Latul; Writing by Jonathan Thatcher; Editing by Robert Birsel17 January 2013 JAKARTA (Reuters) – Heavy monsoon rain triggered severe flooding in large swathes of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, on Thursday, bringing the city to a halt with many government offices and […]

Extinction looms as Indonesia opens forests for logging – ‘We’ll see the extinction of all the charismatic species in 10 to 20 years’

By Michael Bachelard, Indonesia correspondent for Fairfax Media15 January 2013 (Sydney Morning Herald) – Some of the richest and most biodiverse forests in Indonesia will soon be opened up for commercial exploitation under a plan drafted by the new government of Aceh. The chairman of the Aceh parliament’s spatial planning committee, Mr Anwar (who goes […]

90 percent of oil palm plantations came at expense of forest in Kalimantan

By Jeremy Hance8 October 2012 (mongabay.com) – From 1990 to 2010 almost all palm oil expansion in Kalimantan came at the expense of forest cover, according to the most detailed look yet at the oil palm industry in the Indonesian state, published in Nature: Climate Change. Palm oil plantations now cover 31,640 square kilometers of […]

How organized crime is destroying the rainforests

By Sara Reardon and Rowan Hooper 1 October 2012 It’s not as glamorous as chercocaine or diamonds, but the illegal logging industry has become very attractive to criminal organisations over the past decade. A new report finds that up to 90 per cent of tropical deforestation can be attributed to organised crime, which controls up […]

Image of the Day: Satellite view of glacier retreat on Puncak Jaya, 1989 and 2009

Glaciers on Puncak Jaya, 1989   Glaciers on Puncak Jaya, 2009 Caption by Adam Voiland, with information from Michael Prentice, Lonnie Thompson, and Andrew Klein 1 September 2012 Tropical and glacier don’t seem like words that belong in the same sentence. But mountain peaks near the equator in South America, Africa, and tropical Asia have […]

A world without coral reefs

By ROGER BRADBURY13 July 2012 It’s past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants […]

Image of the Day: Satellite view of deforestation in Kalimantan, Borneo, Indonesia

Caption by Tassia Owen7 July 2012 Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of Borneo, was once a lush tropical landscape full of some of the most sought-after timber in the world. In recent years, a combination of logging and agriculture has contributed to a rapidly changing landscape. Forests are gradually being cleared and replaced by palm oil […]

Indonesia rainforest burning covers Southeast Asia in haze

By LIZ GOOCH23 June 2012 KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – For much of the year, the Petronas Towers, the world’s tallest twin buildings, are gleaming landmarks visible far from the city center here. But last weekend, the 88-story structures were shrouded in a smoky haze that prompted doctors to warn people with respiratory problems to wear […]

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